'PUBG' Is Still Probably Coming To PS4 At Some Point

The Xbox One release of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds may have far from technically perfect, but a raft of performance bugs have never held back the massively popular Battle Royale game before. Going into 2018, the game shows no sign of slowing down: it just released a new map and left early access on PC, and it continues to dominate the Steam Charts by an unreasonable margin, recently topping a staggering 3 million players. Unsurprisingly, developer PUBG Corp. is looking to expand. In the console space, PUBG is currently exclusive to Xbox One, making a major get for Microsoft's console in a year without a lot of standout exclusives. A recent interview with PUBG Corp. CEO Chang Han Kim from South Korean publication Inven seems to point to a PlayStation 4 release as an eventual goal, though vague statements and no discussion of timing likely mean that the Xbox exclusive deal will continue for the foreseeable future.

“As it’s going to be an exclusive title on Xbox One for some time, we’d like to focus on completing the Xbox One PUBGfor now,” “If we have the opportunity, the final goal would be to launch the title on every platform.”

This is largely in line with what we've heard before, as neither the developer nor Microsoft have ever denied the possibility of a PS4 version.The PlayStation Network has no early access program, Kim says, which allowed the game to hit both Xbox Live and Steam before enough of the kinks were ironed out to call it a finished product. And that means that any version of PUBG released on PlayStation will have to meet Sony's restrictions quality: it's not like there's never been a buggy game on PSN, but there's nothing close to the Laissez-Faire attitude of early access.

PS4 isn't the only platform Kim is talking about. The developer is also working on a version for mobile devices for the Chinese market, though it will have to make the game align with "socialist core values" in cooperation with Chinese publishing partner Tencent. In the same interview, Kim also talks about expanding PUBG into a multimedia empire that encompasses animation, eSports, movies and more. PUBG Corp. is hardly the first developer with a smash hit that's attempted to spin the game forward into other opportunities, and others like Rovio and Supercell have been successful in the past.

2017 was a big year for PUBG. There's the argument to be made that the fanbase will tire and that things will wane before stabilizing, or that new competitors will sap its dominance in the genre, but I'd predict an even bigger year in 2018. Not only is the game's savagely addictive loop as strong as ever, new players are signing up every day. What will be most interesting to watch is how the team grows the core game alongside releasing it on more platforms. Switch? Maybe? One can dream.

I'm a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games, technology and that whole gray area that happens when technology and consumers collide. Google